Ocean Debris Network
An Ocean Debris Network (OD Net) is emerging to address a problem that demands creative solutions across disciplines. Smithsonian photographer and dive officer Laurie Penland filmed this swirling garbage monster at the Smithsonian Marine Research Station on Carrie Bow, a small island on the southern end of Belize.
The work of media artists like Penland evokes an emotional response to the uncanny, eerie world of plastic that we humans are creating in the sea. Raising awareness can enlist financial support and talent to the cause. Penland said, “I was struck by the contents – all items I personally use at home and mostly plastics. I tried to think of how I could rid my house of plastic.”
Divers and scientists like Mary Crowley, Founder of Ocean Voyages Institute, and Sylvia Earle, former Chief Scientist of NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency), Founder of Mission Blue, know this ocean problem firsthand and saw the dire consequences of neglect before most others.
Boyan Slat, 21-year-old founder of the Ocean Cleanup project in the Netherlands, has attracted press and money, while Crowley and Earle, older women who have worked on this problem for decades, and who are highly informed, have not received the attention or level of financial support that their expertise deserves. Slat’s ambitious vision is dependent on technology that has just been tested and will be ready to launch in 2018. The system collects plastic and is responsive to ocean currents. Mary Crowley’s organization plans to start with removal of ghost nets, and bringing ships to the plastic that needs removal rather than waiting for the plastic to flow into a large technological installation.
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain. The enormity of the problem, calculated from data taken from 24 expeditions over a six-year period to 2013, was compiled in 2014 and published under the title
Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea
in the scientific journal PLOS One, the first study to look at plastics of all sizes in the world’s oceans. Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25 tons of plastic particles in the oceans, most of them “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm, largely deriving from products such as food and drink packaging and clothing. Millions of pieces of debris float in five large, subtropical gyres, diagrammed below in National Geographic.
The image below (Reuters) of fishermen in the Bay of Manila, published in the Guardian, illustrates how some beaches showcase the enormity of a problem that is otherwise invisible to those on land.
Marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabanas led a team to complete the first ever map of ocean trash (below), published in the July 7, 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The full article is here, and all map views are shown here.
Creative teams like the World Game Beta team, a 2009 finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, were inspired by the ocean debris challenge to imagine how Ocean Cleanup could attract broad participation. The four team members, Katy Barkan, Jimena Leiva Roesch, Manuel Mansylla, and Alessandro Preda, proposed an interface with a non-hierarchical system of buttons as a virtual infrastructure, enabling diverse “players” to collaborate, continually adding fresh content and updating old content. The following year Manuel Mansylla launched Trash Patch. While his art installations drew attention to the challenge, as did Australian filmmaker Richard Pain’s threat to swim across the Pacific through the trash patch, both made news for awhile, and made a contribution by making news, but the attention was too hard to sustain. Katy Barkan developed a project for Gates to Iquitos, Peru, where water level fluctuates thirty feet over the course of a year. John Todd, winner of the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, developed a concept called Ocean Restorer, extending Ocean Arks International, which he co-founded with Nancy Todd three decades ago.
Laura Parker writes in a National Geographic article titled Nearly Every Seabird on Earth is Now Eating Plastic (September 2, 2015) that plastic is found in 90% of seabirds, as this albatross in Australia poses to confirm.
Charles Moore, seaman who first sited a swirling gyre of plastic in 1997, thought it would bankrupt a nation to clean it up. What seemed impossible less than two decades ago must now be tackled from many angles because ocean health is critical for all life on Earth.
An Ocean Debris Network requires a sustained, monumental effort to counter decades of thoughtless ocean dumping. The Marine Debris Tracker mobile application is a joint initiative of the NOAA Marine Debris Program and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative (SEA-MDI), a program in the University of Georgia College of Engineering. The tracker app allows us all to make a difference by checking in when we find trash on our coastlines and waterways. It’s now on APPLE itunes. This app brings this great problem to a large, decentralized population of swimmers, boaters, and beachcombers, all able to share information with each other and with expeditions committed to cleaning up our plastic-filled ocean.